Welcome to the 17th writing club update!

Before launching into the writing club, I have a little preview of something @JacobCoffinWrites has spearheaded: a wiki resource for solarpunk writers who are looking for realistic visions of the hopeful world to be. You might have noticed a new link to the 🎉 this brand new writing wiki 🎉 in our community sidebar. Anyway, I’ll let the intro speak for itself here:

Writing aspirational fiction is hard. If you’re trying to write a better world, you need to build actual, workable, solutions into your setting and that requires so much knowledge to do well. Descriptions in a single solarpunk scene on a pedestrianized city street could involve a mix of civil engineering, history, cultural knowledge, plant knowledge, city planning, accessibility outreach, mass transit vehicle design/infrastructure, and more. A whole story might add in permaculture practices, modern airship design and operation, phytoremediation, or all kinds of other stuff! Compare that to cyberpunk where there’s both a sort of cultural familiarity to lean on, and a pass on bad ideas because you’re writing in a dystopian setting, and the differences are pretty clear.

It’s a lot for any one writer to try and take on. Luckily we don’t have to work alone. Any future worth building is going to be pretty collaborative and consensus-driven, so it makes sense to build our depictions of it the same way.

(On that final note, we’re still trying to figure out a way to let people contribute to this wiki.)

But back to the seventeenth writing club, in the sage words of chapter 17: Communicating with a PostScript Printer (page 571) of Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, by Richard Stevens, /* don't want to write() to block */ – but isn’t that just the thing? Sometimes you have to write() in order to get through the block.

Speakering of writing(), here are our writer[]:

As is it ever has been and will eternally be, blessed randos should feel totally free to drop in with their updates, or comments on the goings ons of others. This little writing club thrives on our interactions, so go interact!

  • Clockwork@slrpnk.netEnglish
    5·
    14 days ago

    I spent an ungodly amount of time in school last month (for my teaching practice), and I’ve only written… slides for my lectures 😅 …which was an absolute blast! I even closed it out with a legendary story of our understanding of light, from optics to quantum mechanics, and the students loved it! This overshadows the disastrous failure of the crowdfunding campaign for the other book, from which I finally feel free. This last month will be entirely dedicated to writing Section B of the Kanteletar novel, which I can hopefully complete before New Year’s Eve.

    So yeah, nothing new on the fiction front, but I got to try my hand at scientific outreach writing and I should absolutely do it again at some point!

    • grrgyle@slrpnk.netOPMEnglish
      3·
      13 days ago

      That sounds so rewarding! I’m glad you had a good month, even if it wasn’t doing “traditional” writing. Good luck on Section B!